Silicon Odometers Might Soon Boost the Performance of Your Computer

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With the help of a new silicon chip, dubbed the “silicon odometer,” it might soon be possible to boost the clock speed of computer processors to much faster speeds.

The new silicon odometer, which is the work of researchers John Keane and Chris Kim, measures the aging — and thus performance — of transistors. Transistors, like everything else in this world, degrade. It happens very slowly — so slowly that you’ve probably never experienced a ‘broken down’ computer chip — but sure enough, gradually and over time, silicon MOSFET transistors age and die.

Transistor aging, as you can imagine, is primarily caused by the fact that they’re being switched on and off billions of times per second. Hot carriers injection slowly increases the voltage required for a transistor to switch, and bias temperature instability can also cause similar problems. Electrically active defects can be formed by oxide breakdown, creating full blown short circuits — and finally, the connections between transistors themselves can deteriorate, too.

If all that wasn’t enough to worry about, processors also create a lot of heat, which simply makes every kind of degradation happen faster.

To mitigate these causes of aging, the only real solution — at least so far — is to vastly underclock processors. The latest Sandy Bridge i7 might be capable of running at 5GHz, but Intel can’t guarantee that it will last very long at that speed, so it’s underclocked to 3GHz, and its everlasting life is all but guaranteed. This criminal under-clocking definitely works, but as the developers of the silicon odometer point out, it’s a bit of a cop out: “it’s kind of like never taking your Ferrari out of the slow lane because you’re concerned that its engine might throw a rod 10 years down the road.”

The main problem that chip manufacturers face is that measuring transistor degradation is hard, and it only gets harder as fabrication processes get smaller and core voltages decrease. The performance difference between a new and old transistor might be only be a matter of microseconds — and when coupled with today’s current method of checking each transistor individually, with equipment that costs millions of dollars, you see why companies like Intel and AMD simply admit defeat and underclock their processors.

Enter the silicon odometer, which is a very specialized chip that’s designed to measure the aging of transistors. Basically, a silicon odometer measures the beat frequency from a pair of ring oscillators. This setup allows the odometer to measure transistor switching changes as small as one part in 10,000, in less than a microsecond. Unlike the current method of checking transistors, a silicon odometer doesn’t require the assistance of a human lab technician, and as it’s just another silicon chip, it doesn’t cost millions to make.

The ultimate goal, though, is to get silicon odometers onto processors themselves, where it could then measure the chip’s age — and thus its potential performance — in real time. This could mean that a computer, when you first buy it, might run at a lithe 5GHz, but over time it will slowly scale itself down to a more sedate and geriatric speed. Just like with cars, a silicon odometer would also give you an accurate estimate of a computer’s age — and, of course, it would also mean that your computer would begin depreciating as soon as you drive it off the forecourt…

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